The Rust's goals of high performance, safety and pay-what-your-use and you-couldn't-hand-code-better won't be sacrificed for sure. The point in ergonomics improvements is to identify "free lunches" that aren't yet taken advantage of.

That being said, lifetimes and traits being both complex and unfamiliar features, there's always going to be quite of a learning curve. But one can always reduce the amount of papercuts. If nothing else, one can at least make the documentation better, the ecosystem libraries better and error messages even smarter.